Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, a control method therefor, and a medium.
Description of the Related Art
In general, when executing printing processing on a system on which an OS (Operating System) operates, the user issues a printing instruction upon designating a standard port monitor incorporated in the OS in advance. The standard port monitor works to transmit printing data generated by a printer driver to a printing apparatus. Even in a large-sized print system including a print server, the user can submit a printing job to the print server by issuing a printing instruction to a virtual printer managed on the print server upon designating the standard port monitor. However, the standard port monitor only has a simple function of transmitting printing data and does not have functions such as a communication control function at the time of transmission. This leads to an error such as a temporal communication interruption during transmission. Under the circumstances, there is known a method of performing more stable submission processing by preparing a custom port monitor implementing communication control, retry processing, and the like on a print server and making the user designate the custom port monitor when issuing a printing instruction.
Some system environments newly provided by an OS, however, may allow only the standard port monitor of the OS to operate. For example, in Microsoft Windows 8® environments, the new printer driver architecture has been adopted, which is designed to inhibit the registration of the custom port monitor in a Windows® system. Such a system cannot implement extension functions such as communication control and retry processing, which has been implemented by a custom port monitor.
In such a system provided with only standard functions, there is available a technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2012-243089 as a technique for implementing extension functions such as printing data transmission and printing job control. According to Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2012-243089, a client terminal acquires information of a printing device (for example, a printer), and a printer driver installs a printer adapter corresponding to the printing device and activates it, thereby implementing a function of an extension printer driver using bidirectional communication.
The technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2012-243089, however, needs to provide support for each printer driver. A print system using a variety of printing devices including past models, in particular, has difficulty in providing support for all the printer drivers to be used. It therefore requires much cost to develop corresponding techniques and perform updating.